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They Hunger was a good Half-Life mod, and they're working on a new one with the Source engine: They Hunger: Lost Souls. They haven't updated their progress in a while, but I still have hope.

You must be one of those scientists at Black Mesa, always running around shitting your pants complaining about how I was supposed to be in the test chamber half an hour ago, and when the horror finally comes, you expect me to save you?! Well, not so much.

A lot of us are still very enthusiastic about classic games. For example: see AtariAge, DigitPress RetroGaming Roundtable, ClassicGaming, etc. There is a community out there alive and well with fans of every type of classic gaming console, old computer, and classic game. And don't forget to do a Google Blog Search for your favorite classic console (atari 2600) or old computer (Apple II) (get the feed...). Classic gamers are buying news products like the Classic USB Joystick Controller (Atari 2600-style) and in the past few years there were a flood of products like the Atari Flashback 2, C64 TV Games, a bunch of Jakks TV games, etc. The classic gaming market will always be around, but I think it will change and update as we get older where newer "old" systems get a chance for the spotlight.

Catch the Chicken was the first Quake mod I played. Very simple rules, silly premise, and lots of fun.

http://chicken.planetquake.gamespy.com/

Hi All, If there is anyone who's still looking at the Quake mods (a game I still love for pure run and gun pleasure!), please check out Marcher Fortress. This was the best of the Quake mods that I've played. http://retroquake.planetquake.gamespy.com/blog/?p=270 It has a good length, some nasty new creatures, and is plenty difficult.

Encouraged by their success in Japan, Nintendo turned it's eye to America. Rather then try to sell in a market they were not familiar with, Nintendo attempted to negotiate a distribution deal with Atari. The Famicom was to be released under the name "Nintendo Enhanced Video System." However, the deal fell through. Later plans to release the console under the name "Nintendo Advanced Video System" never materialized. The Nintendo Advanced Video System was to include a keyboard, a cassette recorder, a joystick, and a BASIC cartridge.

Meh. I'm never going to find the original Nintendo Power article, but this is good enough.

You can't compare it to Guitar Hero at all, it's not the same genre. Review sites are reversing their oppinion about the game after getting a better look at it.

I guess it also means that in ten years when valve shuts down and the person that buys their platform, decides that out of maliciousness they don't want to continue offering the service, and also that at that stage I am too poor to afford 3D Virtual Lesbian Extravaganza on my VR rig, then I might be saying "Well, damn, I can't play TF2 against the other three people that are still trying to play it". But thats fairly unlikely.

Because no one still plays online shooters from 10 years ago anymore, right?

Surprised about Germany banning a game? Most violent games released there are toned down. Essentially the content filter on every game is set to on and the knob is broken off. Executive Producer Glen Schofield said that 'the primary theme of Dead Space is dismemberment'. (Source) He probably refused to make a low-gore version, which would change the game completely.

No one knows any details for certain (IIRC the game isn't even in development yet, just announced), but it will almost certainly be in the new WoD, as White Wolf is (to my understanding) no longer publishing material for old WoD. Have a look for yourself: facts and rumors.

get the 3.03 update http://planetcnc.gamespy.com/View.php?view=RedAlert.Detail&id=186

http://www.cncnz.com/files/redalert/patches.php

TF2.

Try the free (next) weekend.

QWTF

.

Okay, time for some ancient history. Let's begin. Who remembers back when our beloved New Zork Times was running articles about something called Cornerstone a completely worthless database program that nobody was ever going to use? Hmm... it's possible some aren't familiar with the story, so I present: Down From the Top of Its Game. Long story short, Infocom lost huge amounts of money, got absorbed into Activision and disappeared into the ether. Why? Because of destructive, incompetent meddling managment.

Closer to home for a D&D story, remember when TSR started publishing The Honeymooners boardgame and Rocky and Bullwinkle ? Put it another name, has anyone here heard the name Lorraine Williams or wondered why Gary Gygax stopped being involved in D&D?

All I know, is that there have been some... well... odd things coming out of Wizards lately. A ridiculous new alignment system, obviously created in the 9 Hells (the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was to convince people that Lawful Evil doesn't exist). A new D&D system that seems to want to replicate MMORPGs on the tabletop, and a concerted attempt to utterly kill the OGL which someone over there must think was a huge mistake. Well, we'll see where they go. I had some dire predictions following the OWOD apocalypse, but I think White Wolf is still chugging along....

Of course, I'm an odd duck anyway. As a kid, I collected RPGs but hardly ever played them. A deranged monomania that has never made any sense to me. Still, I'm fascinated by watching gaming corporations die... or even subsidiaries.... so I'll be keeping my eye on this.

Seriously. Nobody really gives a shit about the official stuff. It's the impromptu weirdness (including Rainz' murder of Lord British) that they remember and celebrate.

In addition to the cybernetic cannon for the pitcher, I gave all my baserunners a laser sword and battled the second baseman when I wanted to steal second.

http://classicgaming.gamespy.com/View.php?view=GameMuseum.Detail&id=306

How is this different from other Open Source editors, like GtkRadiant and QuArK?

Just so you all know, the greatest RPGs of all time are:
1. Ultima 5

If you haven't checked it out yet -

http://lazarus.planetdungeonsiege.gamespy.com/

Well worth the time if you enjoyed the original.

I am glad to hear that he is broad minded enough to include Autoduel, which breaks from the traditional fantasy theme.

For a long time I thought that Ultima V was the best Ultima ever made. Then I met someone else who shared that opinion and then knew that I may not be crazy. Ultima IV was also not far behind, or at least it's equal. That's probably why a group of people went through great pains to recreate Ultima V using the dungeon seige engine. (see this link for info.)

A lot of the other games mentioned I remember playing on the C=64, Amiga, Apple II and PC.
Another good one is Sentinel Planets. That was a hybrid space combat / planetary exploration game with EGA graphics on the PC. Probably one of the first PC games that was vaguely well done.

I do disagree with the assessment of Diablo. It sounds to me like he turns a nose up at diablo because it emphasizes action more than the roleplaying aspect. In comparison to his favorite, Baldurs Gate, it is a completely different game. Personally, I enjoy the more action based games myself, mostly due to a lack of time and brain power to want to do anything else after a long work day. Just a sign of getting older I suppose. The Diablo games and Starcraft are the perfect balance. You can jump in, have a good game and put it away for a while.

Good times...

Ummmmmm. Ever heard of Battle.net? Apparently there is a huge community of online StarCraft, WarCraft, and Diablo series players. StarCraft came out in 1998. According to GameSpy, the original Counter-Strike currently has 33097 servers and 79928 players. Counterstrike 1.0 was release in 2000.

Based on that, I'd say that a good multiplayer game will have online playability for at least 10 years. That is a pretty decent amount of time for hardware to catch up.

...are doomed to repeat it.

Can you say "MSX"?

  + What is a MSX computer?
      The whole MSX story started in 1983 when the computer companies
      wanted to make a worldwide home computer standard.
      The idea was that you could run programs made for one machine
      on a variation on models from different companies (Just like the
      PC standard today).
      Companies involved with this was among others, Sony, Philips,
      Spectravideo, Sanyo, Yamaha, Mitshubishi, Panasonic, Dragon,
      Daewoo and a lot of other companies.
      The MSX was based around the Z80 3.5Mhz 8Bit CPU, a well
      know and well supported CPU for its time. It also came with
      a 3 channel PSG which had no problems matching the poor quality
      PC sound or other machines made in the early 80's. There was also
      the possibility to add extra sounds via SCC cartridges made by
      Konami, MSX Music (FM-Pac) from Panasonic and also a soundcard
      originally made by Philips. As it also supported 16 colors the
      machine was well suited for games and education programs.
      Later models had more colors and more RAM.
      The MSX did very well in Japan, South America (there are 400.000
      MSX machines only in Brazil!) and quite well also in Europe.
      It did not however become a huge success worldwide, but it did
      reasonably well, in fact it was made and sold in Japan till
      well into the 90's... and the user base still have lots of active
      fans (including myself), though not the same as it was 10 years
      ago for natural reasons... (the developent goes on and so does the
      computer freaks :)) Still it is possible to obtain new hardware
      for the MSX even today thanks to various MSX clubs. These clubs
      make the Moonsound soundcard based on OPL-4 and is said to be
      very good. There is also the GFX9000 graphics board that add even
      better graphics to the MSX in addition comes things like SCSI
      interfaces, adapters etc......

History of the NES game that never was: Hellraiser from Color Dreams

I have always been a fan of qpong myself.... It seams like with low gravity this may finally be a possibility!

Civ4 is just too damn time intensive. It could be a great extracurricular, but as an in class thing, it's just so slow! And even at the Collegiate level, I recall reading an article about how a professor offered students a traditional term paper or to keep a log playing a scenario he built about the romans. He was upset for two reasons a) none of the students took the offer and b) the game made it very hard to map history. The way it models culture and religion means religions spread easily but never die, and that intersections of cultures happen peacefully. The author's particular complaint seems mostly to be that the AI will switch religions based on what's advantageous rather than personality.

If a Professor is having this sort of trouble, I have a hard time imagining your average HS teacher coping well with a class based on Civ4.

The high end game industry lives in its own (un)reality.

How the hell is it Intel and the PC's manufacturer's fault for integrated graphics, when most PC's are for business use, where they, at best, play card games on. People won't pay for power they don't need.

The market for insanely fast, high-end games seems to have shrunk in favour of casual games, MMOs, and "gameplay" games. Instead of working on graphics engines, the hotspot for innovation seems to be game play and game experience. Examples abound: Wii Sports, Bio Shock, Mass Effect, World in Conflict, the endless stream of "war games" like Gears of War and Call of Duty, etc.

None of these games can be played with Integrated graphics; WoW will run max ~10-15 fps on X3100 Integrated graphics, and will probably degrade without aftermarket cooling. Almost all sales people at Best Buy or even at the Apple Store are very clear about what models are meant for games, and which ones aren't. Yet Tim claims that poor, blind, customers are being sold PC's that won't play games. I guess he's never heard of a "2 week return policy"?

I think Doom 3 killed the market -- after that experience, people don't want to buy the same old 10 year old game with new graphics and some minor gameplay improvements.

For example, if you improve the graphics (a bit) AND the gameplay AND change the setting or genre, you may have a winner... The current graphics champ, Crysis, has done fairly well, selling 1 million through the end of January, despite early reports that it was flunking as bad as UT3. Gears of War 2 is hotly anticipated and I bet will slam UT3's sales despite being on the same engine. I haven't heard what UT3's sales are, last I saw it was 1.2 million for PS3 + PC combined, which seems to indicate PC sales sucked.

I'd like to see how far anyone would get with a joystick in, say, rocket arena, or ETQW ;)

What about the SRD is not free? I don't see how the "Product Identity" clause of the OGL affects the SRD because the SRD doesn't include any WotC "Product Identity." Are you referring to something else?

See my other posts in this thread for more clarification (including links to the criticism sections of the WikiPedia pages on Open gaming and d20 System). I'll also address your question here[1].

The biggest problems are outlined in the above Technomancer Press quote, which alleges that US patent and copyright laws specifically do not protect game mechanics themselves[2], only algorithmic implementations (i.e. software patents) and the copyright on the text itself (i.e. on grounds of plagiarism). Given this assumption, Technomancer Press makes d20 System/D&D-compatible products without the Open Game License or d20 System License. To avoid the copyright issues, they simply don't paste sections of the System Reference Document (or any other copyrighted works) to any excess prohibited by law. This allows them to do things expressly prohibited by the OGL, such as citing a specific page in the Players Handbook or calling the person running the game "Dungeon Master." OGL as it currently stands is a good approximation of Free Culture, but it's not quite there.

See also my earlier post citing the Technomancer Press FAQ (which more closely picks at the issues with the OGL), an IGDA article on Protecting Game-Play rules and the legal struggles of Data East (and as a cons, the rulings on KC Munchkin), which are the best I could come up with for citations.

[1] - I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, I don't know the hard facts, and I have no intent to spoil or harm Wizards of the Coast or the Open Gaming movement. I am an advocate of Free Culture, and I will someday soon release my own D&D campaign world under a more free license.

[2] - I could not find a direct citation of this claim, though I'm sure I've read that there was a definitive Supreme Court ruling protecting game mechanics from patent in the same way that many Slashdotters would like to see software go. It may not have been Technomancer Press.

Wizkid was in fact released just over fifteen years ago.

Igor starts a new blog "... a raw unfettered glimpse into my psyche and subconcious" Dork Tower #621

Warning: rambling post ahead.

My gut feeling is that, from strictly a hardware perspective, we're already capable of building a human-level AI. The problem is that, from a software perspective, we've focused too much on approaches that will never work.

As far as I'm concerned, the #1 problem is the Big Damn Database approach, which is basically a cargo cult in disguise. Though expert systems are useful in their niches, "1. Expert system 2. ??? 3. AI!" is not a workable roadmap to the future. I'm certain that it's far easier to start with an ignorant AI and teach it a pile of facts than it is to start with a pile of facts and teach it to develop a personality.

The #2 problem is the Down To The Synapse approach. This, unlike BDD, could quite possibly create "A"I if given enough hardware. But I think that, while DTTS will lead to a better understanding of medicine, it won't advance the AI field. It won't lead to an improved understanding of how human cognition works — it certainly won't teach us anything we didn't already know from Phineas Gage and company.

Even if we go to all the trouble of developing a supercomputer capable of DTTS emulation of a human brain — so what? If we ask this emulated AI to compute 2+2, millions of simulated synapses will fire, trillions of transistors will flip states, phenomenal amounts of electricity will pour into the supercomputer, just for the AI to give the very same answer that a simple circuit consisting of a few dozen transistors could've answered in a tiny fraction of the time, using the amount of electricity stored on your fingertip when you rub your shoes on the carpet during winter. And that's not even a Strong AI question. That's not to say that working DTTS won't be profound in some sense, but we know we can build it better, yet we won't have the faintest idea of where to go next.

That brings me to my core idea — goals first, emotions close behind. Anyone who's pondered the "is/ought" problem in philosophy already knows the truth of this, even if they don't know they know the truth of it. The people building cockroach robots were on the right track all along; they're just thinking too small. MIT's Kismet, for instance, gives an idea of where AI needs to head.

That said, I think building a full-on robot like Kismet is premature. A robot requires an enormous number of systems to process sensory data, and those processing systems are largely peripheral to the core idea of AI. If we had an AI already, we could put the AI in the robot, try a few things, and ask the AI what works best. So, ideally, I think we need to look at a pure software approach to AI before we go off building robot bodies for them to inhabit.

And how to do that? I think Electric Funstuff's Sim-hilarities captures the essence of that. If we give AIs a virtual world to live in — say, an MMO — then that removes a lot of the need for divining meaning from sensory input, allowing a sharper focus on the "intelligence" aspect of AI. Start with that, grow from there, and I can definitely see human-level AI by 2029.

I would say some percentage of those 8 million would not be classified as "hardcore gamers". I was at my cousin's house over Thanksgiving a few years ago and his 11 year old was playing WoW. He did not really fit the definition of what is described here by GameSpy. That being said, I have no idea how many "hardcore gamers" would buy a digital picture frame, but based on the comments posted on Slashdot, I get the feeling most self-proclaimed "hardcore gamers" scoff at the idea of a Digital Picture frame as beneath them. If I were marketing digital picture frames, "hardcore gamer" demographics would not be my target market but rather those who enjoy a cruise on Crystal cruise lines.

I really _hated_ many of its games:
Phantom System.

It's a peculiar situation. The currency is backed by fixed price vending of basic items, but items that can't be bought from vendors are subject to inflationary pressures.

If you're interested in this subject, you'll be fascinated by Diablo II. Money became essentially worthless, and the Stone of Jordan economy picked up the slack.

My first computer games were in my elementary school library on TRS-80's: Oregon Trail and Worm. A year later I had my own TI-99/4A and was programming simple games myself.

I have always preferred games with lots of depth of interaction between the player and the computer, like Civilization. These days I make maps for Starcraft including adaptations of RISK, Civilization, Phantom, and Turret Defense. A game that's moddable is much more fun to me than one that's the same every time it's started up.

My first non-computer games were probably Match, War, Tag, Hide-and-Seek, Candyland, and a wide variety of other board games to follow.

There was a fun Atari game called Agent USA that did this way back in 1984.
Czech it out! http://classicgaming.gamespy.com/View.php?view=GameMuseum.Detail&id=33

So it's a bit like just giving away a Stone of Jordan in Diablo II? No way!

Only if I get at least ten perfect skulls in return!

I'm not going to bother about some of the things I feel are erroneous in Sepht's assessment of Alien Arena - it's the man's opinion and he's entitled to it. I will however, leave you all with something to make your own minds up with - especially in regards to the graphics/engine of the game. These shots are taken with the game as it currently stands in SVN. Alien Arena 2008 is set to be released likely in late winter 2008, and you can see here from the shots what it will look like. http://cor.planetquake.gamespy.com/arena/aa2008/aa2k8_1.jpg http://cor.planetquake.gamespy.com/arena/aa2008/aa2k8_2.jpg http://cor.planetquake.gamespy.com/arena/aa2008/aa2k8_3.jpg http://red.planetarena.org/

I'm not going to bother about some of the things I feel are erroneous in Sepht's assessment of Alien Arena - it's the man's opinion and he's entitled to it. I will however, leave you all with something to make your own minds up with - especially in regards to the graphics/engine of the game. These shots are taken with the game as it currently stands in SVN. Alien Arena 2008 is set to be released likely in late winter 2008, and you can see here from the shots what it will look like. http://cor.planetquake.gamespy.com/arena/aa2008/aa2k8_1.jpg http://cor.planetquake.gamespy.com/arena/aa2008/aa2k8_2.jpg http://cor.planetquake.gamespy.com/arena/aa2008/aa2k8_3.jpg http://red.planetarena.org/

I'm not going to bother about some of the things I feel are erroneous in Sepht's assessment of Alien Arena - it's the man's opinion and he's entitled to it. I will however, leave you all with something to make your own minds up with - especially in regards to the graphics/engine of the game. These shots are taken with the game as it currently stands in SVN. Alien Arena 2008 is set to be released likely in late winter 2008, and you can see here from the shots what it will look like. http://cor.planetquake.gamespy.com/arena/aa2008/aa2k8_1.jpg http://cor.planetquake.gamespy.com/arena/aa2008/aa2k8_2.jpg http://cor.planetquake.gamespy.com/arena/aa2008/aa2k8_3.jpg http://red.planetarena.org/

Might try out of the way locations. I had a friend on a business trip to the middle of 'poorville' and when he went into their big store they had them in stock on the shelves.

So if your kids need it, try the surrounding area....
if you have a relative that you are planing on visiting and they are in the boonies...call their locale stores.

Heck...call their local stores anyway and if the store has them in stock, go visit the relative....any excuse to get a Wii is a good excuse.....any...except this

Please see: GameSpy's 3DAP. The entire site was shut down a few years ago, along with all of the staff, so that the parent site could control who recieved what kind of review. The staff was informed about the closing about a month in advance, with a reason given as something along the lines of "content issues."

I was involved, anon for obvious reasons.

If you can't sell it, open it up! Release it under the GNU GPLv3 and perhaps the content under CC by-sa-nc. There's great stuff coming from the modding community, some mods are even completely new games like Bid For Power, True Combat Elite and Urban Terror (the more recent versions of it are quite well done).

Enemy Territory was canceled and then put up for download, it became very popular and True Combat Elite is based on it. Heck, it's probably being shared on news groups and through bit torrent already, uploading your own torrent to a torrent site costs nothing!

1
/ \
2 3
/ \ / \
4 5 6
/ \ / \ / \
...

The nice effect of that merging is that the increase in needed missions is "only" quadratic, instead of exponential.

And, yes, more than half the paths led to "you lost the game". Take too many arcs to the left, and nothing could save the outcome any more.

Sounds like sorta what you're proposing. The same idea _could_ be applied to good/evil choices.

Well... don't get me wrong, WC was a good game. I will say however that there must have been a reason why they dropped the idea in WC2. If I'm allowed to take wild guesses, I'd say:

1. Any player would see far fewer missions than the game contained. No matter if you're top ace or quadriplegic, you'll see only one arc. Ditto for applying the idea to good vs evil. Mr Pure or Darth Sidious, you'll see only a square root of the number of nodes. That's wasted programming and design effort.

Think in KOTOR terms. Let's say each node is a planet, and you want to visit 6 planets during the game. You start on Taris, and on the good side the next planets would be Dantooine, Tatooine, Manaan, Korriban and finally the Rakata world + starforge. That kind of a graph with 6 levels, would still contain 1+2+3+4+5+6=21 planets. Out of which you see 6. That's a major waste of money and talent.

I'll get to pruning them later.

2. It still doesn't scale well. If you want to lengthen the game, each level just adds disproportionately more worlds out of which only 1 will be present in any given campaign. E.g., adding a 7'th level makes it 7 planets seen out of 28. It increased the waste from 15 worlds to 21 worlds. And percentage-wise from 71.4% to 75%.

3. And again, it's actually worse than it sounds, because most people just reloaded until they won all battles even if they sucked at the game. There were disproportionately fewer people who saw the planets and story along the "lose" arcs.

It would be slightly more balanced if it were "win for the good" and "win for the evil" arcs, instead of "win" and "lose". But not by much. Basically now almost everyone will see the left and right edges of that triangle, but almost noone will see the centre.

4. The fact remains that, by your idea and Origin's too, a lot of paths will lead to a "lose" state. Whether you kill the player early or let him play to the end of the "you lost" arc, it's still giving people a camouflaged "shoot yourself in the foot" option. Which tends to be less fun than it sounds.

5. Especially killing off the player, you have to realize that it's just making the game linear again, only this time in a non-fun way. You've just turned the triangle into a pair of trousers, so to speak, instead of just one tube. Decisions taken early on will force him down one leg or the other, which is linear again. And being killed for not following the tube is one of the least fun ways to be forced along the tracks.

Some of the principles of good game design, at least according to Brian Reynolds (the author of Alpha Centauri) include:

- "bang, you're dead" choices are _not_ fun. If chosing the "good" answer will just get a previously evil player killed, with no recourse, that's just not fun. Even if you have to have an arc that leads to bad consequences, there should be ample warning and a possibility to take counter-measures at each step along that arc.

- choices along the lines of "a piano falls on top of you, jump to the si

I managed to find a screenshot for Deus Ex 3! Based on your description, I mean. Oh, and a release date of 1980.

Quake Done Quick With a Vengeance beats the first level of episode 2 in a mere 7 seconds: http://qdq.planetquake.gamespy.com/qdqwav.txt

Lobster Man

This is a staggering creature, taller than a man and boasting six limbs, it resembles nothing more than an aquatic Demon. The similarities between this creature and the Earth lobster have earned it the nickname of Lobsterman with the X-Com troops. This is a behemoth of the deep. A carefully designed fighting creature of incredible strength and practically invulnerable to missile fire. Its pincers alone can crush steel.

Lobster Man

This is a staggering creature, taller than a man and boasting six limbs, it resembles nothing more than an aquatic Demon. The similarities between this creature and the Earth lobster have earned it the nickname of Lobsterman with the X-Com troops. This is a behemoth of the deep. A carefully designed fighting creature of incredible strength and practically invulnerable to missile fire. Its pincers alone can crush steel.

Tracers. Dead simple graphics, most of our effort was spent on playability and being a "well behaved" program.

http://amigareviews.classicgaming.gamespy.com/tracers.htm

I can't take responsibility for the box art or backstory, the publisher tossed our concept and redid the whole thing from scratch. Which was probably to the good, since the original backstory we came up with was sufficiently unmemorable that I actually can't remember it. :)